A team of US-based engineers, funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and DARPA, has begun the development of a MacGyverbot — a robot that, like the tenacious TV hero MacGyver, can interact with its environment in novel ways to solve problems.
Using BrainGate, the world’s most advanced brain-computer interface, a woman with quadriplegia has used a mind-controlled robot arm to serve herself coffee — an act she hasn’t been able to perform for 15 years.
In the words of DARPA itself, the Avatar program will work on “interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bipedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.”
In a move that proves that Godzilla isn’t the only worldwide threat to emerge from Japan, the Japanese Defense Ministry is working on a defensive, weaponized computer virus capable of tracing the path of a cyber attack to its source in order to shut it down, disabling every system it comes across along the way.
Those crazy, shortsighted scientists: Instead of creating a robot to do our bidding, some French roboticists and engineers have developed a robot that can control you — as long as you’re willing to strap yourself into a few electrodes.
With 400 transistors and standard CMOS manufacturing techniques, a group of MIT researchers have created the first computer chip that mimics the analog, ion-based communication in a synapse between two neurons.
An interdisciplinary, interuniversity group of scientists from Vanderbilt, Cornell, and CFD Research Corporation have created an artificial intelligence capable of solving complex scientific problems from scratch.
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